Changes to the Libvirt Virtualization Library

Version 0.4.0 of libvirt, a free library for administration of virtualized operating systems has just been released.

The new features in this release include authenticated remote access via the Simple Authentication and Security Layer (SASL). The Framework Policy Kit is used for local access.

The libvirt library, on which tools such as Red Hat's Virtual Machine Manager are based, supports Xen and other virtualization technologies such as QEMU, KVM and OpenVZ. The new version now supports CD changes under Qemu and KVM.

On top of this the developers have improved portability. The library can now be built on Windows thanks to Cygwin and Mingw. They have also improved the API for the NUMA memory architecture and removed various bugs.

Libvirt is licensed under the LGPL and can be used in combination with Python and C programs. On top of this, there are Libvirt bindings for Ruby, OCaml and Perl. The software is available as a source code tarball, and as binary and source RPMs here. Debian packages have not yet been updated to the new version.

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Red Hat's Emerging Technologies working group has now released Virtual Machine Manager (Virt-manager) version 0.5.0, a desktop application that gives administrators the ability to manage virtual machines running on, say, Xen.